A crime novel, if one in fancy dress, and the palms of the book’s title are more than just a threadbare tropical cliché ... Perhaps Pan’s finest achievement is the novel’s heavy: a professional killer and all-around dirty-deeds man with the improbable moniker of Gumby ... Occasionally struggles with what might be termed 'first novel problems': the ambition to be all things to all people, to entertain us to within an inch of our lives, and to gobsmack us with its poetry ... Ventures a great deal more than most.
The novel never loses the coming-of-age feel, even when focused on characters other than Eddy and Cueball. It’s reminiscent of a cable television series starring characters trying to balance a normal life and criminality ... The narrative loses steam ... Some scenes might feel extraneous or overlong, but Florida Palms earns its payoff. When things really get out of control, readers have spent time in the heads of all the important players. And while the broad strokes of Pan’s novel might feel familiar, perhaps to a fault, the characters still feel like complicated people, experiencing the world in vivid, literary prose.
Gritty but overlong ... Pan convincingly portrays life in the shadow of the region’s monolithic aerospace industry. The Space Coast atmosphere hasn’t been more pungent on the page since Patrick Ryan’s The Dream Life of Astronauts.
